The use of tildes on the vowels and n's makes it look like the orthography is based on some combination of Portugese and Spanish. I don't think Galician marks nasalised vowels (because they're not phonemic) so I suspect it's not that. This makes me think it's something South American and, given the apparent Portugese influence probably Amazonian. Unfortunately, that really doesn't help much

My first guess is Old Persian, because of the long vowels, the -xsh- combination and the apparent semitic plural on daibitîm, but the vowels with tilde and ringed as don't work.

Instead, I'll guess Avestan. It seems to be Indo-Aryan of some sort, and it's not Sanskrit transcription, so that makes it seem right. (But then, for all I know, it's Bactrian).

Sir Novelty Fashion wrote:

ebẽñnẽ prñnawu mẽn. e prñnawatẽ hanadaza hrppi ladi ehbi setideime.

This one, I agree that Amazonian is a good guess, I'd say Guaraní, but I'd know that immediately. I don't think it's Pirahã or Tariana, either, which are the other Amazonian languages I know anything about. Hixkaryana, perhaps?

Looks like the last person who got it right seems not to have posted a text to continue. I'd like to keep this going, if that'd be alright. Judging by the discussions in this thread, I don't think this will be very difficult for many people here to guess:

It clearly has significant borrowing from romance languages but the use of its consonants doesn't quite seem right (the final q, the apostrophes (presumably glottal stops) and the need to distinguish between different "h"s) so I'm guessing it's not actually romance. The fact it has a lot of different consonants, including it seems uvular and glottal stops and multiple "h" sounds makes me think of Maltese (which is an arabic language that has been in close contact with romance languages for most of its history).

I'd agree with eSOANEM's assessment of Maltese, for drego's contribution/As for eSOANEM's mystery language, assuming it's not a conlang, I can't remember if those are allowed in here, the only living language I know that uses ð is Icelandic. So, assuming it's a living language, that'd be my guess. If it's not a living language, then it could be from anywhere in the family of Old Norse.

eSOANEM wrote:It clearly has significant borrowing from romance languages but the use of its consonants doesn't quite seem right (the final q, the apostrophes (presumably glottal stops) and the need to distinguish between different "h"s) so I'm guessing it's not actually romance. The fact it has a lot of different consonants, including it seems uvular and glottal stops and multiple "h" sounds makes me think of Maltese (which is an arabic language that has been in close contact with romance languages for most of its history).

Entirely correct.

I have no idea of yours, so I can only guess where it may come from by some of its features. A couple of those words seem Finnic to me, but I can't think of any such language which uses the caron and acute accent diacritical marks, much less the letter eth. I could probably find the language if I actively researched it by its features using Wikipedia (to be honest, I can't remember right now whether or not this is against the rules of this game, so I'll assume it is), but for now, all I can guess is that it's one of the Finno-Ugric languages or that it's otherwise related to the Uralic language family, and is spoken somewhere in/near Finland or Estonia, perhaps closer to Scandinavia?

Carlington wrote:I'd agree with eSOANEM's assessment of Maltese, for drego's contribution/As for eSOANEM's mystery language, assuming it's not a conlang, I can't remember if those are allowed in here, the only living language I know that uses ð is Icelandic. So, assuming it's a living language, that'd be my guess. If it's not a living language, then it could be from anywhere in the family of Old Norse.

There's also Faroese, but it doesn't look to me like it's a Scandinavian language. Also assuming it's a living language myself, I'm thinking it's a Finnic language with a small population and it's one that I've never heard of or encountered before.

drego642 wrote:I have no idea of yours, so I can only guess where it may come from by some of its features. A couple of those words seem Finnic to me, but I can't think of any such language which uses the caron and acute accent diacritical marks, much less the letter eth. I could probably find the language if I actively researched it by its features using Wikipedia (to be honest, I can't remember right now whether or not this is against the rules of this game, so I'll assume it is), but for now, all I can guess is that it's one of the Finno-Ugric languages or that it's otherwise related to the Uralic language family, and is spoken somewhere in/near Finland or Estonia, perhaps closer to Scandinavia?

Definitely looks very german-ish but the j's and the double vowels add a kind of dutch-ish flavour to me. There some words which seem pretty English too (mainly destroi). Possibly a colonial pidgin or creole?

eSOANEM wrote:Definitely looks very german-ish but the j's and the double vowels add a kind of dutch-ish flavour to me. There some words which seem pretty English too (mainly destroi). Possibly a colonial pidgin or creole?

Derek wrote:Well right now I'm on vacation in the US Virgin Islands, and I have learned (from Wikipedia) that they used to speak a Dutch-based creole here, until it was replaced by an English-based creole.

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Well, I feel I can safely assume it's Slavic, due to its lexicon (especially words like "w" and "z"), its diacritical marks, and its affinity for large clusters of consonants... Oh, and there's also the characteristic "-owych" in a couple of places. But obviously the fact that it's in latin script rather than the Cyrillic alphabet narrows it down a bit (assuming it's not a transliteration).

I see both "l" and "ł" here. The only language I know of which uses these ("language" - not including IPA) is Polish, but I'm familiar enough with that language to know that it doesn't have characters like "č" and "š". Czech does, but I'm not sure if they have the "ł" as well.

It wouldn't happen to be a pidgin or a creole, would it? Is it a living language?

Not expecting to get it right, but just to get it out of the way, I'm going to guess: Czech?

*Edit: Also, since we have the OP here: is it cheating if I actively research to find out what language it is - not by googling the text, but by working off of hunches and educated guesses and using websites like wikipedia to try to determine what language it is by similarites in characters, lexicon, etc. - or do we pretty much have to have heard of it before and pull it out of our heads?

Last edited by drego642 on Fri May 31, 2013 3:40 am UTC, edited 1 time in total.

drego642 wrote:Edit: Also, since we have the OP here: is it cheating if I actively research to find out what language it is - not by googling the text, but by working off of hunches and educated guesses and using websites like wikipedia to try to determine what language it is by similarites in characters, lexicon, etc. - or do we pretty much have to have heard of it before and pull it out of our heads?

What's happened so far seems to be that different prople contribute their thoughts on a sample until someone who knows enough guesses the right language. Sure, there's a bit of research that goes on, but I think we've generally been trying to avoid too much Wiki-ing or Googling, even if it's not to directly search for the excerpt.

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There have been a couple where I've been unable to resist googling it after I've posted my guesses. I did that with the negerhollands example. But whenever I've done that, I've made sure not to post on that clue again.

All of those dotted letters screams transcription, but I'm not getting much further than that. I can tell that it probably has case (ḳočiš and ḳoči), but mostly isn't showing much obvious morphology (repeated endings, recurring roots, etc.), and has a bunch of smaller word, suggesting isolating morphology. I can't even really suggest a language family. It has a vague Georgian look to it. Perhaps one of the less complicated Caucasian languages?

Some of the words in the second one seem vaguely Turkish, but it's clearly not Turkish, and if steewi can't suggest a language family, I'm guessing not even Turkic.

So, maybe a Caucasian language spoken in or near Turkey?

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